Gove's army prepare for class(room) warfare

Anyone who opposes "bringing competition into schools, health and welfare services" is a "guerilla" who needs to be dealt with by Vietnam-style counterinsurgency methods.

That's the view of Sean Worth, PM David Cameron's special adviser on health until last June, expressed in a recent Telegraph article.

"Hardliners who lost recent battles over social reforms" are now "regrouping for a new wave of local-level disruption," he warns.

Worth means that teachers, nurses, doctors and parents want to fight Tory privatisation plans.

When he says they "lost" I think he means the Tories succeeded in getting their "reform" Bills through Parliament.

But he's now clearly worried that these Westminster victories are threatened by national resistance.

"While Michael Gove impressively chalks up the wins in Westminster debates, localised strikes and threats of walkouts by unions are being organised," he says.

Socialist, "hard left" and trade union activists are "mobilising to infiltrate" to defeat health and education privatisation - though they seem to be "infiltrating" the schools and hospitals in which they work.

Worth concedes that privatisers of all parties should "acknowledge their total failure to connect with ordinary working people" and get them to like privatisation.

This connection is going to have to be made through military counterinsurgency methods.

He advocates "guerilla warfare," arguing that "the most effective answer to dealing with that was developed by a free-thinking British army officer, Robert Thompson, in the '60s. Unlike the rest of the top brass of his time, Thompson understood that ultimately the battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people was far more important than endlessly chasing after the guerillas themselves."

In fact, Thompson's "hearts and minds" strategies were vicious systems of control.

Thompson first fought the Malayan insurgency in the 1950s. He then became a US army adviser in the Vietnam war - he ended up as a "pacification" adviser to Richard Nixon.

In Malaya he tried to win "hearts and minds" by forcing people out of their homes into strictly policed "barbed-wire villages."

In Vietnam he favoured forced resettlement in similar "strategic hamlets."

His goal was to break the link between guerillas and the population by putting the population into authoritarian settlements run by militias, where food and other necessities were controlled by the authorities. These could be given or withheld in order to win hearts.

Both his Malayan and Vietnamese counterinsurgency strategies were marked by repression, and in fact outright massacres.

This is the approach Worth thinks should be applied to those resisting privatisation. You might think he's just a crank, but he is influential.

He runs the Better Public Services programme at Cameron's favourite think tank Policy Exchange.

He's also a lobbyist for a firm called MHP Communications, which represents privatisation companies like the Priory and Working Links.

His call for a counterinsurgency in our schools shows that the Tories, frustrated by their weakness, are going, well, a bit funny in the head.

I'm not sure how clients of MHP feel about their lobbyist suggesting the government approach teachers and nurses in the way Nixon approached the Viet Cong.